President Donald Trump on Monday slammed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell over his decision not to lower interest rates.
“We have a bad Fed chairman, really bad,” Trump said at the White House. “If he would lower the rates, if he would lower the rates. And I tried being nice to the guy. It doesn’t help. He’s like a knucklehead. Oh, he’s a knucklehead, a stupid guy. He really is.”
Trump also said he believes interest rates should be below 1%.
“We should be at 1%. We should be less than 1%,” the president said.
TRUMP ADMIN PRESSES POWELL OVER FED’S COSTLY HEADQUARTERS RENOVATION PROJECT
The attacks against Powell come as the president and his administration press the Fed chair over costly renovations at the central bank’s headquarters.
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought sent a letter to Powell on Thursday saying Trump is “extremely troubled by your management of the Federal Reserve System.”
TRUMP DEMANDS ‘TERRIBLE’ FED CHAIR POWELL RESIGN IMMEDIATELY, CALLS FOR RATE CUTS
Vought wrote that the Fed has “plowed ahead with an ostentatious overhaul” of the central bank’s headquarters and added, “Cost overruns aside (about $700 million and counting), the plans for this project called for rooftop terrace gardens, VIP dining rooms and elevators, water features, premium marble and much more.”
At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing on monetary policy, Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., criticized the renovation project, citing the design elements that are the focus of Vought’s letter, saying in his opening remarks the renovations “feel more like they belong in the Palace of Versailles than a public institution.”
Powell, during the hearing, said the media reports are “misleading and inaccurate in many, many respects.”
“I would just point to there’s no VIP dining room, there’s no new marble – we took down the old marble, we’re putting it back up, we’ll have to use new marble where some of the old marble broke.”
“There’s no special elevators, there’s just old elevators that have been there. There are no new water features, there’s no beehives, and there’s no roof terrace gardens,” Powell said. “All of the sort of inflammatory things that the media carried are either not in the current plan or just inaccurate.”
Trump has repeatedly threatened to fire Powell, who he appointed to the role in 2017, over the central bank not cutting interest rates according to his demands.
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